The nodes communicate with each other in p2p protocols and share the "rack" information among themselves. Every node is aware of the network topology of all the other nodes in the cluster including which rack they are on.

In AWS I can select in which Availability Zone, and the configure the Cassandra process to be aware of it.
in Azure I can't.
I need to be able to query the Update Domain upon VM startup to change the configuration dynamically.

If I would use PaaS and Worker Roles I could retrieve the information using the RoleEnvironment and RoleInstance classes, since I am using IaaS I can't use these APIs.

The nodes communicate with each other in p2p protocols and share the "rack" information among themselves. Every node is aware of the network topology of all the other nodes in the cluster including which rack…

I'm trying to create a Linux virtual machine (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 7/25/2014 release) in a virtual network. Whenever I specify an SSH certificate instead of a password, I keep getting an error that the machine creation failed. The certificate upload succeeds, however.
This has happened in the past as well, but I didn't worry about it then since I was focused on a PaaS deployment. Please fix this! If it's a matter of some required settings combination not being met, please highlight that in the UI.